"I have heard many a man say that the marrow of a man's backebone will breed to a snake."—Hist. Nat., x. 66.
The story of the "fair young German gentleman" reminds me of one of a gentle shepherd and his beloved Amarante, told in De Britaine's Human Prudence, 12th edit., Dublin, 1726, Part I. p. 171. The corpse of the "Cæsar," seen by St. Augustine and Monica, was most probably that of Maximus, Emperor of the West, slain by the soldiers of Theodosius, A.D. 388.
Sir Thos. Browne—"treating of the conceit that the mandrake grows under gallowses, and arises from the fat, or οὖρον, of the dead malefactor, and hence has the form of a man—says:
"This is so far from being verified of animals in their corruptive mutations into plants, that they maintain not this similitude in their nearer translation into animals. So when the ox corrupteth into bees, or the horse into hornets, they come not forth in the image of their originals. So the corrupt and excrementitious humours in man are animated into lice: and we may observe that hogs, sheep, goats, hawks, hens, and others, have one peculiar and proper kind of vermin."—Works, Bohn's edit., vol. i. p. 197.
The editor furnishes the following note:
"The immortal Harvey, in his De Generations, struck the first blow at the root of the irrational system called equivocal generation, when he laid down his brief but most pungent law, Omnia ex ovo. But the belief transmitted from antiquity, that living beings generated spontaneously from putrescent matter, long maintained its ground, and a certain modification of it is even still advocated by some naturalists of the greatest acuteness. The first few pages of the volume entitled Insect Transformations (in The Library of Entertaining Knowledge) are occupied by a very interesting investigation of this subject."—See also Sir T. Browne's Works, vol. i. p. 378., vol. ii. pp. 523, 524.; and Izaak Walton's Complete Angler, passim.
The equivocal generation of bees is copiously dwelt on in Bochart's Hierozoicon, London, 1663, fol., Part II. p. 502. Instances of their attaching themselves to dead bodies, in spite of their ordinary antipathy, are given at p. 506.
Eirionnach.